STEPHEN GLOVER: It’s laughable to say Labour’s been betrayed by Mandelson. Blair, Brown and Starmer had been those who nurtured this monster

The downfall of Peter Mandelson is an immense event in British politics. This bad, and now disgraced, man has been a key figure in the Labour Party for over 30 years.

When he published his memoirs in 2010, he simply called them The Third Man – the suggestion being that, after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he was the next most important figure during Labour’s rule from 1997 to 2010.

For once in his life Mandelson told the truth. He was Blair’s most influential lieutenant and did more than anyone else to help him achieve power. Later, from 2008, he served Gordon Brown, although the two men had hated each other.

In Mandelson’s memoirs (in which his friend the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein had a hand, as emails released by the US Department of Justice show) Brown comes across as virtually psychotic.

Mandelson occupied three senior positions in the Cabinet and ended up as First Secretary of State, which meant that he was effectively deputy prime minister to Brown.

He has been central to Labour, serving not only Blair and Brown but also Keir Starmer, as British ambassador to Washington, before revelations about his close relations with Epstein forced his resignation last September.

Now that it has become apparent not only that Mandelson hero-worshipped the dreadful Epstein, but that he was also passing him state secrets about the British economy, Starmer and the rest of Labour’s leadership are turning on him.

This is a monumental diversion. Of course Mandelson is a treacherous and dishonest person but that has been clear to dispassionate observers since the final decade of the last century.

Wes Streeting is in the forefront of Labour figures portraying themselves as hapless victims of Mandelson’s dastardliness when in fact it should have long been obvious that he was a slippery and self-serving rogue. The Health Secretary was himself an acolyte of the Prince of Darkness.

Streeting, who hopes to be our next prime minister, toured the broadcasting studios yesterday morning, possibly with a bag of onions in his pocket to help him sound authentically stricken. He might as well have had a string quartet in the background scratching out some doleful dirge.

He declared that he couldn’t state ‘strongly enough how bitterly [Mandelson’s] betrayal feels for those of us in the Labour Party who feel very personally let down and also feel that he, as well as betraying two prime ministers, [was] betraying our country and betraying Epstein’s victims’.

Epstein’s victims have certainly been betrayed, but Labour and two prime ministers (he means Starmer and Brown) haven’t been. They nurtured the monster Mandelson. It’s the British people who have been betrayed.

Because Starmer is still – just – Prime Minister, his indulgence of the Prince of Darkness should outrage us most. When he appointed him ambassador to the United States, with the eager support of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, the charge sheet against Mandelson already ran to many pages.

Everyone in politics knew he had been sacked from the Cabinet in 1998 for not declaring a £373,000 interest-free loan for a mortgage from multi-millionaire Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson.

Mandelson had the unusual distinction of being sacked from the Cabinet for a second time after he intervened to expedite an application for a British passport by the Indian billionaire S.P. Hinduja.

Starmer knew all this when he decided to give Mandelson the top diplomatic job, where his alleged expertise in trade matters would supposedly be useful in dealings with the tariff-obsessed Donald Trump.

The Prime Minister was also aware that the new ambassador had raised eyebrows as a European Union Commissioner after it was revealed that he had been a guest on the yacht of Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, while he was at the centre of an EU investigation.

A quick Google search would have shown that as an EU commissioner, Mandelson also spent time on the yacht of his wealthy chum Nat Rothschild before flying in Rothschild’s private jet from Switzerland to Moscow, and then on to Siberia as a guest of Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire Russian industrialist.

Wasn’t there more than enough to worry about here for Starmer to take a pass on Mandelson and appoint someone reliable with a less controversial track record? Most of us wouldn’t put such a person in charge of a village tombola.

But Starmer had more – much more. He knew that Mandelson had been close to Epstein, and he should have known about reports in the Press that in 2009 he had stayed at the paedophile financier’s house in Manhattan while he was serving a prison sentence for soliciting sex from girls as young as 14.

After forensic examination by Kemi Badenoch during yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Starmer finally admitted that vetting had revealed Mandelson’s continuing relationship with Epstein. Why, then, was the ambassador appointment made?

Starmer’s apologists claim the vetting process was defective. This is a piece of nonsense deployed by the likes of Streeting. The truth is that the PM should have had no need of any vetting in the first place because Mandelson’s utter unsuitability for high office was blindingly obvious even to the pigeons in Parliament Square. The fact that the PM still went ahead is further proof of his bad judgment – and I would say his lack of moral discernment – in a prime ministership littered with disastrous decisions. It is absurd to claim that he was ‘betrayed’.

By focusing on supposed betrayal, Labour apologists such as Streeting are attempting to absolve Starmer, successive Labour leaders and the party itself of fostering a crooked politician for three decades.

Gordon Brown has the cheek to ask why Sir Chris Wormald, the Cabinet Secretary, didn’t launch an investigation when he approached him last September over his suspicions that Mandelson may have been responsible for leaks.

Doubtless Wormald and the No 10 machine should have done more. But Gordon Brown is gravely at fault for handing his old enemy Mandelson a peerage, and making him de facto deputy PM, despite being fully aware of the man’s dodgy past.

Brown was in difficulties because of the financial crisis and his own declining popularity, and he misguidedly believed the Prince of Darkness could shore him up. Why should he now be surprised that the man he so unwisely succoured has finally been exposed in all his moral depravity?

Tony Blair has even greater cause to hang his head in shame. He virtually invented Mandelson, depended on him and promoted him. He had to sack him once but soon had him back before being obliged to despatch him a second time. Yet the two men remained close conspirators. Blair has so far failed to criticise his old friend.

In recent days, comparisons have been made with the Profumo affair. John Profumo was forced to resign in 1963 as Tory Secretary for War after he had lied to the Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler.

Mandelson’s downfall may turn out to be as momentous in political terms as Profumo’s – perhaps more so. But actually there is no comparison between the two men.

John Profumo was a war hero. Until his disgrace, his political career hadn’t been characterised by scandals and moral lapses and seedy relationships. After it, he gave himself selflessly to charitable works. Who can imagine Mandelson ever doing that?

Here is a man who, more than any other politician in recent decades, has taken politics into the sewer. But he wasn’t some irrelevant, rotten backbencher. He was a pillar of New Labour.

The betrayal wasn’t that of Labour leaders. They knew perfectly well the kind of man he was, and they both countenanced him and encouraged him.

No, the people who have been betrayed are the voters. Mandelson is a political mountebank who has disfigured public life. And, until the dramatic repudiations of the last couple of days, he was safe and secure at the heart of the Labour Party.